The Associated Press seeks to dictate the terms of "fair use" of its copyrighted articles.

The NYT reports:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

That would put a crimp in blogging!

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

Good thinking.

“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said....

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

I agree that bloggers shouldn't just cut and paste most of an article when all you are doing is pointing to an article or creating a place for people to comment on it, but quoting is extremely important. Much good blogging involves going through a text line by line and critiquing the precise wording. Even when all you are doing is saying here's a good article, you need to quote it a bit to interest people and make them want to look at it.

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them. One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.....

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

They are, however, trying to worry bloggers.

Lots of commentary collected here. I like this from Jeff Jarvis:

* I don’t really give a damn what your guidelines are. I have my own guidelines.... The point of fair use and fair comment is that there can be no set guidelines. That’s just ridiculous.

* I will say again that the AP should start using our linking and quoting guidelines rather than its homogenization practices....

The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rule around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don’t exist today. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

As Jarvis notes, when we blog news stories, we often have a choice of sources and we drive traffic to the sources we link. Bloggers can make AP our link of last resort — or completely boycott it. That's going to cost AP, isn't it? And if the answer is yes, that goes a long way to proving that what we are doing now is fair use.

ADDED: Jarvis's guidelines:

Bloggers should not quote excessively from others’ content and when they quote it should be for a reason — to agree, disagree, comment on, recommend, correct (there can be many reasons). This is fair use and fair comment. There can be no word-count limit because it depends on the use. If I want to fisk a story, I may well quote the whole thing because I am commenting on it all. The test is reasonableness: a fuzzy test, but life is fuzzy.

Jarvis versus lawyers:

My suspicion is that it’s the lawyers who got the AP into this mess. My best advice for the AP’s executives is that they should try to practice the bloggers’ ethic of the link and quote themselves (updating their news values with one more value). My next-best advice is that they should walk down the hall and tell the lawyers to put a damned sock in it or send them off for a very long off-site on a golf course where they can do no harm. This is not going to be resolved enforcing the fine print of outmoded laws built for an extinct age. This is a constantly changing landscape that must be maneuvered with flexibility and openness. But if those lawyers continue to threaten bloggers who know more about this new age and are only practicing their appropriate ethics, I will continue to use this space to suggest where socks should go.